Test & Measurement on EDN, October 2013

Today is Halloween and I have 900 pieces of candy to give away this evening. For two hours, the street will be full of children, hundreds of them, looking for tricks and treats (mostly treats). On top of that, we here in Boston are basking in the glow of yet another World Series championship, the third in 10 years. What could be better than that?

This month features two articles on how to view that nasty reality known as jitter, which limits signal integrity in high-speed digital systems. Daniel Chow, a longtime contributor at DesignCon, shows us The many faces of jitter. There are several ways to express jitter, and this article shows how they relate to each other.

Continuing on the signal-integrity theme is How to think in dB. Signal-integrity evangelist Eric Bogatin explains the concept of the decibel and why it's so useful in electrical engineering.

EMC engineer Kenneth Wyatt posted two articles in October. Wyatt, a fan of low-cost test equipment, surveys pocket-sized oscilloscopes in Try an oscilloscope for under $200. Just this morning, Wyatt posted Measuring resonance in cables where he shows how to use simple tools to measure resonance in cables and other objects that act like antennas.

Aubrey Kagan had a measurement problem. He needed to monitor voltage and current inside a closed controller panel. In Wireless oscilloscope sends data to a tablet, Kagan explains in an interview how he used Bluetooth and a digitizer board he designed to collect and send data, and why he chose an Android tablet over an iPad as the display.